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6 Reasons to Love StumbleUpon

First, welcome to SU friends checking out this post. As background, aimClear blog’s readership is made up primarily of our medium and large size corporate and regional advertising agency clients. Believe it or not many of them have never even heard of StumbleUpon. Given SU’s propensity to drive significant amounts of traffic and generate quality links to worthy websites, the SU community should not be overlooked by any serious Internet marketing professional. The question now is Will ebay Wreck StumbleUpon?

That said, I want everyone to know that SU is also an amazing place to make friends of all stripes and hang out in the coolest of communities. The value of this social media tool is well known. According to Search Engine land eBay May Buy StumbleUpon For $75 Million.

SU Basics
At the moment 2,427,477 channel surfing subscribers peruse the internet via StumbleUpon. The SU algorithm learns what they like by their bookmarks, behavior, and makes content recommendations- many of which are stunning in quality. SU is my personal social community of choice to connect with friends, share content, and meet new people that have interests similar to mine. Here are the top 6 reasons I love StumbleUpon:

1: The content to discover is outstanding. Bookmarked website suggestions from my SU friends (and even the random SU toolbar “stumble” button) consistently generate useful content suggestions. Sometimes pages I learn about make me laugh out loud or want to study. The search functions in SU include queries by category, friend, tag, and other methods. The interface is deceptively simple and intuitive for the engine’s depth and sometimes more useful to me than Google as I search for niche’ content. Keeping in mind that I’m an SEM practitioner, check out these suggestions from SU friends, random stumbles, and category searches:

2: The people I meet on SU are so flipping cool! For instance my friend Rose is a 50 year old pay per click professional who is a highly respected writer and forum moderator over at Search Engine Forum. Lyndoman is a kick ass master linkbaiter from the UK. These folks are among my favorite new friends. I’ve met many others on StumbleUpon some of whom I’m likely to be in touch with for the rest of my career. If you’re shy about meeting people and aren’t only out to get laid (though I’m sure you can do that too), Stumbleupon is the place to be to hang with deep grownups who want to share.

3: The interface is second to none. All social communities, to varying degrees provide mechanisms to share and rate people and content, make friends with differing degrees of anonymity and voyeurism, and offer stepped level of authority for committed users. StumbleUpon is the best programming out there and almost always works perfectly. It’s simplicity is deceptive for the massive programming depth.

4: The etiquette is refined and rare. I’ve never met a more polite troupe on the Internet or in the physical world. There is very little or no spam and I’ve rarely encountered a rude person who would not go away when asked to. I’m not approached by prostitutes or overt marketing pitches. The SU algorithm prevents gaming to great extent…ok it limits it except for those who are clever .

5: The traffic StumbleUpon can generate is prodigious. I have SU friends who sometimes bookmark content from this blog. We’ve seen spikes in traffic ranging from 150 unique visitors in a day to over 1000 in 4 hours. I hang out in SU for friends, community, and cool content. The fact that our blog receives thousands of visitors from SU is a happy extra. *blush*

I hope you all check out StumbleUpon and join. DO NOT start by bookmarking your own content. Like all social communities it is best to let others promote you and for you to promote others. If you’re tired of the MySpace meat market mentality (perhaps you’ve grown up a bit) than for sure you should check out SU. Find me in SU and say hello. The user name is aimClear.

NJ @ The SEM Zone

i LOVE LOVE LOVE Stumble Upon! great post.

Posted May 29, 2007

Andy Beard

Nice write up

I only have 2 negatives about SU, which based on how I typically study things quite closely is impressive.

1. They don’t seem to respond to feedback from potential advertisers
2. I have noticed an anti-commercial use side to some of the stumblers, and they can easily organise burying through use of their blogs and certain tags

Posted May 29, 2007

Marty Weintraub

Andy,
Yes, I see your point and agree. In SMO integrity is a double edge sword.
Marty

Posted May 29, 2007

Steven C

Excellent post ! I love the people I have met and look forward to a “stumbling” future !

Steven C.

Posted May 29, 2007

Marty Weintraub

Cool..thanks for the comment Steve.

Posted May 29, 2007

Matt Keegan

I, too, am a satisfied stumbler and I pitch this tool as often as I can. I’m still waiting to hear if the eBay buy out comes to pass; this “rumor” has been active for some six weeks now so I’ll be glad see how all of this works out.

Posted May 29, 2007

Marty Weintraub

How does anyone think Ebay would leverage SU should the sale come to fruition?

Posted May 29, 2007

Blake Farber

What happened to the 6th reason?

But I agree stumbleupon is the greatest site i ever stumbled-upon!

Posted May 30, 2007

Matt Keegan

Marty, let’s hope we won’t be stumbling on a bunch of eBay trash if eBay turns out to be the suitor. I would hate to see their stuff mixed in with S.U. Perhaps, eBay will simply offer an S.U. link on eBay.

Posted May 30, 2007

Marty Weintraub

Blake,
How funny is that! There are only 5!
Marty

Posted May 30, 2007

Jake

Yeah, I have had stumbleupon for a while now, only time I find a bad website is when I fill in criteria I dont like as much as I think I do. Great post, very descriptive

Posted May 31, 2007

Marty Weintraub

Thanks for stopping by Jake.

Posted May 31, 2007

Jill

I love Stumble too – a friend who I turned onto stumble sent this post to me thru stumble….whoa, confusing!

Long Live Stumble!

Posted May 31, 2007

Marty Weintraub

Jill,
I’ve been experimenting with posting links in posts directly to SU profiles. I’d like to see SU accept Pingbacks on SU profiles and “Pages” pages. That would make it so SU users are notified when a blog links to their SU stuff.
Marty

Posted May 31, 2007

Stephen Welton

Want to get noticed. Get stumbled!

Buzz marketing at its finest. Word of mouth advertising with a Web 2.0 twist!!

Steve

Posted May 31, 2007

Marty Weintraub

Tell ebay to build in pingbacks and trackbacks now if they really want to make up for it. Then they will at least give us a case study in converging blogs and SMO.
m

Posted May 31, 2007

Matt Ellsworth

I couldn’t agree more – I love stumbleupon – thanks for the great write up!

Posted May 31, 2007

Marty Weintraub

Posted May 31, 2007

crunchynut93

Whenever I have any spare time I consider SU to be a worthy time-filler…
Nice article!

Posted May 31, 2007

Marty Weintraub

SU is a good search tool in it’s own right. It’s a vertical SERP designed for you…the best version of personalized search created so far for me.

Posted May 31, 2007

Marc

I use several of these sites daily, and have tried out dozens. I also jump on any new ones I find, and StumbleUpon is in my top three.

Even though I spend all day in front of a screen I can still jump online late at night from home and see whats new here.

Some weekdays its the only site I check during my free time.

Posted June 1, 2007

Marty Weintraub

Marc,
What are your other favorite sites?
Marty

Posted June 1, 2007

Henry

Addicted to StumbleUpon.
About the only thing I do all day.

Posted June 9, 2007

Jason

Wish you wouldn’t have sold out to EBAY. I would have done the same thing though.

Posted June 10, 2007

Judy Scott

I love SU. Lately though I keep getting errors from SU when my browser tries to open a window. Can you help?

Posted June 14, 2007

chris woodhead

” Just stumbled” as you do, on this and i agree with your comments.For the past few weeks I have learned a great many things by ” Just stumbling”

Posted June 14, 2007

Marc

Marty,

I am also a fan of del.icio.us, digg, hugg, care2.com, mybloglog, and a few others…

i live in front of a screen

Posted June 14, 2007

Steve

I’ve been using SU for about 7 months, and I totally love it. A person can literally waste an entire day clicking on the stumble button and getting something new.

Posted June 14, 2007

Marty Weintraub

Internet Prosac…

Posted June 16, 2007

pelf

The thing is, most stumblers either:

(a) rate a post/page, OR
(b) stumble the next post/page

and they do not normally take time to drop a comment or two. People would say that they use SU to “find great content”, but when they’ve found it, they just give it a “thumb’s up” and then proceed to stumble the next page.

Which brings us back to square one: Who will benefit from all these stumbling? Definitely not the bloggers because what good would it do to bloggers if visitors merely “pass by” their posts/pages without leaving a comment, or subscribing to the blog?

So to all stumblers, if you stumbled upon a post/page you like, why not leave the blogger a comment? I’m sure it would make everybody’s experience better

Posted September 24, 2007

Marty Weintraub

Yes, I totally agree with you Pelf. It’s not just about drone-like Stumbling behavior. It’s about sharing content and meeting people.

Posted September 24, 2007

Sam Freedoms Internet Marketing Controversy Blog

What a riot… you seem to be such a magnet for StumbleHatred… why is that?